POOL AND PROBABILITY

Oh. I know you're itching to know how my colleague Paul and I got on in the pool tournament, right?

Well, worry not my noble friends, for our tale of courage and adventure is ready to indeed be told. Rest thy sleepless heads on thine pillows and gather the silk of Endymion around thee, for the mystery of the quest, long awaited, is at an end and thou canst dream and laugh and eat and pray and sleep once more.

We're out. Thrashed by no less than the Finance Guys themselves. They motored round the table like Steve Davis and Jimmy White, analysing, calculating, measuring, striking, potting, ricocheting and surgically removing the table of pool balls. Within ten minutes, we were shaking hands and going back to our desks.

I had a couple of shots. I moved some of the balls around and expertly rolled the cue ball into the corner pocket a few times. It clunked and grumbled as it rattled under the table. Paul was a lot better than me, but our combined strength wouldn't ever be enough to fluke a win against these titans of the game.

It was good for team-building though. I suppose I'm just astounded at how the Finance Guys seem to be so good at everything. I wonder if it's a kind of mind-set, a neat calculation of every possible angle and outcome, a purely mathematical expectation that striking the cue ball here will produce enough spin to send the object ball there.

I thought for a while about the nature of probability and information, and how data enables you to remove some of the unpredictabilities of a closed system. Data informs our experience and helps us know exactly how to operate, in order to get the result we need.

I was momentarily relieved, imagining that the Finance Guys were equally as accurate and as successful in their day jobs. Then I hung up my pool cue on the rack and went back to being a technical author.